No more prohibitions against statements critical to religions

Through its decision on 21. March, the UN Human rights Council has finally put an end to the long lasting attempts to hinder and to criminalize statements which are critical to religions. The Council´s recent and unanimous draft resolution about religious tolerance is a confirmation of the strong ties between free expression and freedom of religion.

Norwegian PEN president, Anders Heger, says: «This is a signal that the international development in free expression issues, are going in the right direction in many issues. We have lobbied actively against these decisions for years, cooperating with several other international freedom of expression- and human rights-organizations.»

«We are delighted that the OIC has come to share our view that in the necessary work of building mutual respect between the world’s religious traditions, the criminalization of speech about a religion—however offensive to its adherents—would have been an unhelpful step,” PEN American Center President Kwame Anthony Appiah said today in New York. “This is especially so because incitement to violence on any basis, including religion, is already exempt from the wide protections for freedom of expression in international law.”

PEN American Center and Norwegian PEN have cooperated on this issue for a number of years, also initiating the UN side-event on religious defamation in Geneva 16th eptember 2011, an event that got some attention from the UN buraucrats.

BackgroundBeginning in 1997, a coalition of countries led by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has put forward a series on resolutions on “combating religious defamation” that contained language demanding that states ban blasphemy and other religious denigration. PEN and a number of other human rights organizations have lobbied against the proposals, warning that they would significantly erode crucial international and national protections for freedom of expression. In submissions to the Human Rights Council and in a presentation for U.N. delegates in Geneva this past September, PEN cited numerous cases where governments have used religious defamation laws to jail writers and suppress unpopular opinions, and it has insisted that blasphemy laws do little to achieve the stated goal of curbing religious bigotry.

Instead of reintroducing the religious defamation resolution at the current Human Rights Council session, the OIC presented a new resolution that focuses on ending religious discrimination. The resolution, which passed unanimously last Thursday, removes all references to protecting religions and shifts the emphasis to protecting individual believers, something PEN has long argued is the correct approach both in principle and in the law.

“Rights inhere in individuals, not in institutions,” the writers organization wrote in a 2008 submission to the Council. “Religions are systems of ideas, embodied in institutions and sometimes states, and as such, they cannot lie outside the bounds of questioning, criticism and description,” it concluded. In live testimony and in videotaped statements presented at the PEN-sponsored session in Geneva last September, several of the world’s leading writers pointed to what Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka called “the conflicting claims of religion.”